There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.
At the end of our NASA careers, no one had a place for us in the military.
There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.
The American people want and deserve a space program truly worthy of a nation of pioneers.
Space is not an enterprise that belongs to the U.S. or to Russia or to China - it is a human endeavor and experience. And that's as it should be.
Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.
Not everyone will understand this need for America to lead the world in space.
In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.
After being once in space, I was keen to go back there. But it didn't happen.